Strzok and Page referred to Trump as an “idiot” during the Republican primaries, the text messages show. Other exchanges indicate that the pair supported Clinton for president over Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic primaries.

Politico noted a March 2016 text in which Page declared: “God trump is a loathsome human…omg he’s an idiot.”

“He’s awful,” wrote back Strzok, who also texted that Trump was an “idiot” in another exchange.

Later:

“This guy thought he was super agent James Bond at the FBI,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said of Strzok, pointing to texts in which Strzok appeared to see it as his mission to protect the nation from Trump.

A sensational — and false — media story from the 2016 presidential campaign claimed there were ties between Donald Trump’s businesses and a Russian bank, Alfa. We now know that story originated with Fusion GPS.

For a year now, there’s been a myth among Republicans: the Legend of Trump.

It goes something like this. Once upon a time, there was an unbeatable candidate, a world-famous politician whose husband had been president, who received unquestioning loyalty from the media. Then came the Dragonslayer: a real-estate mogul with a toilet of gold and a tongue of iron, who cut the unconquerable evil queen down to size and seized the throne from her. The laws of political gravity simply didn’t apply to him: He could utter any vulgarity, brazen through any scandal, batter down any media infrastructure. And if Republicans followed him — if they lit their torches from his — they too could slay dragons.

Now, it’s quite possible that Donald Trump was the only Republican who could have defeated Hillary Clinton —other Republicans might have tried to take the high ground with a candidate significantly dirtier than the local garbage dump. Trump has no tact and no compunction, so he was always willing to drag her off her high horse. But Trump truly won not because he was a stellar candidate — far from it — but because Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate. And this means not only that his dragonslaying isn’t duplicable, but also that other candidates with similarly shady backgrounds who attempt to imitate him will end up failing dramatically.

Currently, federal taxpayers subsidize colleges and universities to the tune of more than $130 billion every year, most of that going to student loans and grants. While some say federal student loans make taxpayers money, the truth is they cost taxpayers money, partially because many self-described students are the equivalent of a subprime mortgage, a situation easy federal money has exacerbated. Federal higher education subsidies have also nearly doubled since 2000, meaning it wasn’t the “old bad days” when we spent much less.

Further, we now have a consistent set of economic research finding that federal student “aid” actually hurts both taxpayers and students by inflating the cost of college. One of the more recent such studies came from the Federal Reserve, which concluded that every $1 in federal “aid” increased college tuition by approximately 55 to 65 cents. Easy federal money is literally making the college cost problem worse.

The breakdown of trust between the sexes is the tragic legacy of the modern feminist movement, but it has taken on a new fervor with the #MeToo campaign and the growing accusation that masculinity is vile, toxic, and inherently predatorial. Fear of men is legitimized, as accusation is treated as fact. Men are seen as “the enemy,” an embodied deviance that must be remolded into the image of a woman. Their sexuality is assumed to be naturally brutal, a threat to be controlled and reduced for the individual man to be considered “safe.”

While women’s willingness to hold men accountable for criminal sexual behavior is to be applauded, the scorched-earth approach we are seeing today is destructive because it undermines trust. When anything from a naive touch during a photo shoot to an innocent attempt at a kiss is compared to rape and sexual abuse, we are not healing society but infecting relationships with the poison of distrust.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is another prime example of our country’s design to restrain government and fellow citizens in this regard: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

This amendment has been used to protect citizens from wiretapping, police ransacking of cars and homes, and collection of personal information such as DNA and blood. Along the same lines, the data we generate as we live in a digital society belongs, rightly, to the individuals who generate it. Those incomprehensible user agreements you sign to get a Gmail or Facebook account acknowledge this by getting at least your technical consent to ransack and sell your data in exchange for the financially costless use of their services.

Government data collection and sharing, especially as expanded in these bills, transgresses against this social compact. Massive government databases already share huge amounts of personal information without disclosing this sharing to the citizens who own it. These bills would expand this infringement upon private property rights. Instead, Congress should do the opposite, and better secure our property rights by severely limiting the extent to which government agencies may collect and distribute our private information. My personal data is my property, not something for companies and governments to plunder for purposes I can’t control or even influence.

While the conflict with the highest body count in all of American history, that war proved not enough. So the protesters of the Civil Rights era also came, as Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The civil rights marchers came not to abolish America, but explicitly to fulfill its promises through the proper channels of public persuasion and law-making, not rioting and vandalism. America once again paid up.

This is fundamentally why statue desecration is both wrong and un-American. These demolitions were not conducted under rule of law or by consent of the governed, as was the case in Charlottesville’s removal of the Lee statue. They’re conducted in the dead of night by criminals whose acts express contempt for America’s social contract. Like the masked vigilantes attacking peaceful fellow citizens and police officers in the name of anti-bigotry, these vandals place themselves above the law and in so doing express contempt for their fellow citizens and the “democracy of the dead” that gave us the America in which they live safely and prosperously, and when brought to justice will ensure their punishment proceeds in accord with their civil rights.

The decision reflects a U.S. desire to continue security cooperation as well as frustration with Cairo’s stance on civil liberties, notably a new law that regulates non-governmental organizations that is widely seen as part a growing crackdown on dissent, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials were especially unhappy that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in May allowed the NGO law to go into effect. Human rights groups and activists have said that it effectively bans their work and makes it harder for charities to operate.

Since Google is a private company I have no problem with them making unequal hiring and promotion rules. I am all in favor of discrimination — the freedom to set one’s own criteria for making decisions — and free association, for any reason, as individuals’ constitutional and natural rights. If they wanted to be an all-man or all-woman or all-black or all-Asian company, or give preferences to whatever people they feel sorry for at the moment, that’s Google’s business. At the level they’re operating they could be an all-woman company and still have the world’s best engineers, as Harvard or Stanford could since many more qualified people apply than can be admitted.

The problem is when they promise “equality” then deliver discrimination. It’s this hypocrisy Damore had the temerity to point out, and for which he was fired. It’s the same hypocrisy inside the famous “Animal Farm” slogan for totalitarianism: “All are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Lindy West of the New York Times recently, and similarly, insisted that unfettered access to abortion is essential to women’s economic and other liberties. Hers is one of many denunciations, by party activists and progressive journalists, of the Democratic Party’s decision to support pro-life Democrats running in more conservative districts. Pro-choice activists in the past decade made the leap from regarding abortion as a tragic necessity to seeing it a positive social good; West now sees it as the central guarantor of American liberty.

Later:

On some level, [John C.] Calhoun and other pro-slavery ideologues recognized that any “right” to slavery would be destroyed the moment the United States recognized that nature’s law affirmed the liberty of enslaved African Americans. Lindy West similarly holds that the human and civil rights of women would be undermined if the rights of the unborn were recognized. Even to question the right to abortion is “to be, at best, indifferent to the disenfranchisement, suffering and possibly even the death of women. At worst it is to revel in those things, to believe them fundamental to the natural order.” For West, abortion is the key to women’s economic, political, and social rights in the United States. If abortion were to be shown to be inconsistent with the natural order, then Lindy believes every freedom gained for women would evaporate.

As a result of a massive ongoing investigation the police have named “Operation Sanctuary,” one British woman and a total of 17 men have been convicted of rape, conspiracy to incite prostitution, and illegally supplying drugs. The men, BBC notes, were from the “Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish communities and mainly British-born, with most living in the West End of Newcastle.”

The federal government’s method of securing power over local schools by taxing citizens, then offering their money back if states follow the ignorant orders of politicized and distant bureaucrats, is illegitimate, unconstitutional, and makes Americans dumber. Like the rest of the administrative state, it’s destructive of self-government and government by consent, which is every American’s birthright.

And it’s totally the most horrible thing you can do to discriminate against people for their faith—except if they are nuns who have taken vows of poverty to serve the poor and just want to do what their belief system commands. Then they need to pay tens of millions per year, get mauled in the press, and be hauled before the Supreme Court for affirming a disfavored religion!

Later:

Excuse me, corporatists, but in America you don’t get more sway simply because you have more money. Making me a pricy mocha has precisely zero to do with your authority to tell me how to think, voice my political views, or vote. You’re not more equal than other citizens just because you each employ a tiny fraction of us. We are Americans, not serfs. You should have just as much political power as you have votes and voices that are equal those of everyone else. That’s a distinctly American idea, because remember: we’re not a monarchy, and we’re not a kleptocracy.

Further, under the distinctly American form of non-totalitarian, limited government, there are some things no one else is never allowed to touch using the political process, because in America it’s our government that is limited and our rights that are individual, inherent, indivisible, and only partially wielded by our governmental delegates at our discretion. These execs should tell BuzzFeed to stick their cultural totalitarianism where the sun don’t shine, and if they want to live under totalitarianism, they can ship off for North Korea. In America, we don’t tell people to clap harder or cry more according to someone else’s political preferences at risk of losing their livelihoods and social status.

The FBI arrested a Volkswagen executive, Oliver Schmidt, in connection with VW’s diesel emissions cheating scandal. Schmidt ran VW’s American regulatory compliance office from 2014 through March 2015. VW and the Department of Justice are still negotiating a deal to end the criminal investigation into the company.